Thomas Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons.
[nitpick]Tom Wolfe, who’s not the same person as Thomas Wolfe.[/nitpick]
The Overseer, by Jonathan Rabb. It’s a thriller about a 16th century Machiavelli-style manuscript, written by a political theorist no less, and set at Columbia University in large part. It was actually a fun read, given the different perspective.
Asimov’s mystery A Whiff of Death is set in the chemistry department of an unnamed university. It’s not nearly as good a mystery as is some of his non-mystery writing, though… I figured it out about halfway through, not from the (scant) clues, but from sloppy writing.
It’s been a while since I read some of these, but…
The End of the Road by John Barth
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
Plays:
The Boys in the Band, play and screenplay by Mart Crowley (More Gay Lit than Academia, but the legendary backstory is that this takes place among the faculty of the Drama departmant at Washington DC’s Catholic University)
The Male Animal by Elliot Nugent and James Thurber (Your instinct might be to attribute the profound or funny parts to Thurber, but I reluctantly conclude that he actually wrote little more than the “colored” maid’s unfortunate dialogue)
Candida by George Bernard Shaw
Presumably, Tom’s parents gave him the name Thomas! 
You’re absolutely right, of course. I had the two writers confused. It must be irritating to have someone else in your field with the same name.
Yeah – tell that to Winston Churchill and Harrison Ford.
“Tom Wolfe” seems more likely to be duplicated.
“Porterhouse Blue” and “Grantchester Grind” are grotesque (but hilarious) satires of life at University of Cambridge - written by Tom Sharpe.
Many of Terry Pratchett’s books feature the wizards of Unseen University, who owe more than a little to Sharpe’s portrayal of academic life.
Harry Potter
+1 for Straight Man by Russo - good and funny.
I have to recommend Robertson Davies’s trilogies - the Deptford and the Cornish. If I had to recommend a single book, it would have to be The Rebel Angels, the first book of the Cornish Trilogy. A wonderful standalone book, with some of the most charming characters and beautifully-written prose I have had the opportunity to read. Why he didn’t win the Nobel for Literature is beyond me…
Critical Chain Is a business textbook disguised as a novel about a young professor struggling with departmental politics and low salaries.
The Groves of Academe, by Mary McCarthy, was written about a fictional college which was based on my alma mater, Bard College.
The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason is a good college story.
Those who like James Hynes’ tales might also like those of the satirical fabulist Will Self. The six inventive, skewed stories (several with academic settings) in his The Quantity Theory of Insanity collectively make a case that Self could be the next Primo Levi – with respect to the short speculative fiction tales blending corporate/academic satire with scientific imaginings.
I only know it from the movie, but A.S. Byatt’s Possession probably qualifies, seeing as it’s about the strained love affair that develops between two English Dept. researchers whose biographical subjects also intersected in a love affair. I’ll hazard a guess that it’s not pointedly satirical, although Byatt’s portrayal the female professor’s anhedonic personality may well have been making a point or two about the excesses of theory and political correctness among hip academics.
Somewhat similar structured to the Byatt novel is Richard Powers’ The Goldbug Variations, which intertwines a DNA researcher’s strivings and love for a fellow scientist with the male/female team of researchers (science historians, presumably) who decades later research the mysteriously truncated career of the DNA researcher. To my shame, I’ve owned this dreadfully serious Great American Novel for a decade and still haven’t gotten around to reading it. The leading critical blurb compares it to Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. (This bodes ill for yours truly, since I’ve never been able to get into Pynchon. It’s also Pynchon-esque in its length, at 639 pages.)
Of the ones previously mentioned, my favorite is James Hynes’ barbed short stories in Publish and Perish. I haven’t heard anything of his 2004 novel Kings of Infinte Space (I can only assume it’s also a Gothic satire of academia, too), so I’ll check it out.
Don DeLillo’s White Noise was amusing enough, if less narrowly focused on academic satire – although its beleaguered Hitler Studies Dept. head was a brilliant comic invention, beginning with the salient detail that he’s risen to that position without ever learning German. Russo’s Straight Man is funnier still, but for the life of me I don’t remember much of it now, except for the bit about the – rabbit, was it? That struck me at the time as being a bit of a ripoff of an infamous stunt by the editors of The National Lampoon. (The “Buy this issue, or we’ll shoot this dog” cover.)
David Lodge’s work just doesn’t have the edginess I was looking for when I was trying him out – I got through Nice Work and about halfway through another one. I’m afraid I’ve written him off as being rather staid and not much of a prose stylist.
We have plenty of novels about students. To clarify, I think phungi is asking for novels about the faculty, who live in a completely different world than the students. Am I right?
The History Man, Malcolm Bradbury.
Jake’s Thing, Kingsley Amis.
And, as mentioned, everything David Lodge has ever written.
**Snoopy **probably just read the thread title and not the OP. When I saw the title, that was the first book that popped into my head.
This thread just doesn’t appear to be my finest hour, does it? 
Another vote for Russo’s Straight Man.
Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin is ostensibly a fantasy novel, but the fantastic elements don’t really come into play until the last fifty pages or so; the first four-fifths of the book follow the lead character through her first three years of class at a thinly-veiled Carleton University stand-in. It also deals with faculty politics, although the narration is limited-third-person: the protagonist’s father is a professor at her university.